Our Long National Light Bulb Nightmare Has Been Averted — For Now

In a magnificent gift to the freedom-loving American people, the Republican House majority has successfully negotiated a delay to the implementation of the ill-conceived ban on the legal sale of 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, which was to have gone into effect two weeks from Sunday, January 1, 2012. The new deadline for the ban is now September 30, 2012, just 38 days before the end of the Age of Obama, Deo volente.

This ban, part of a 2007 omnibus national energy and security bill -- which, as everyone duly notes, was signed into law by former President George W. Bush -- was about more than light bulbs. Far more.

It concerned the inside of every home in the United States of America, from the frailest shack to the most opulent compound. It became as much of a lightning rod as abortion. It touched the hearts and minds of a free people who, unlike Cubans in 2005 and the cowed population of the European Union in 2009, did not want their basic liberty to light their homes to be by a bulb of the government's choosing.

The fact that the most popular substitute for the traditional light bulb was (is! -- it's still for sale all over the land) filled with toxic mercury, the grotesque "compact fluorescent" bulb of environmentalists' dreams, hardly helped the cause of its proponents, the all-too-familiar very green lobby.

The one thing the environmental lobby underestimated, and underestimated big time, was this basic fact: human life is part of the environment.

Deeply-loved and endlessly-hugged trees, the spotted owls, and the baby seals of yesteryear all have their lobbies. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have long thought nothing of destroying personal property (spraying the mink coats of wearers with permanent red spray paint as they walked along cities from Fairbanks to Atlanta) and demanding that the National Institutes of Health and other research centers end the scientific tradition of testing medications on mice and rats who, in the process, invariably die, so that human beings might live.

There was only one species the environmentalists failed to take into account in their thrust for mastery of the seas, the skies, and the Earth. And that was their fellow man, people who -- like the environmentalists claim they do -- care about their children, their grandchildren, and all who come after them as stewards of the planet, a responsibility the environmentalists claimed they alone took seriously.